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Tuesday, October 3, 2017

The Deep Melancholy of David Bentley Hart

Dr. Hart has recently completed his translation
of the New Testament, and it is now for sale at a book store near you. One naturally asks, “Why do we need another
translation of the New Testament since so many translations already
abound?” One could understand someone
wanting to have another crack at translating the Old Testament, since the verbal concision of the Hebrew tongue and
the corruption of the text at a number of places offer opportunity for a number
of different readings—to say nothing of the question of how to factor in the
Septuagint readings in a modern English translation. But the New
Testament? Surely the field has been
worked over pretty thoroughly and no real puzzles remain? And the versions offered by individuals have not
always met with universal acclaim as worthy alternatives—versions such as those
by William Barclay, J.B. Phillips, Ken Taylor, and Eugene Peterson.

Dr.
Hart lets us know why he thinks we need yet another version of the New
Testament—present translations are not sufficiently literal and serve to hide
from their readers the radicality of what the texts actually say.Reading them in the old versions such as the
RSV, the King James Version, and the New American Standard Bible, leave us too
cozily at ease in Zion, and we might imagine that we are like the Christians of
the first century when in fact we are utterly different.If we were to read the New Testament with the
fresh and newly-opened eyes free from the bias foisted on us by centuries of
tradition, we would see for ourselves how unlike the first Christians were from
ourselves, and how utterly we fail to understand the New Testament’s radical
message.Indeed, we comfortable
Christians would regard our first century compatriots as “fairly
obnoxious:civilly reprobate,
ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible,
socially discreditable, and really just a bit indecent”.Hence Hart’s title for his explanatory essay
of 2016, “Christ’s Rabble”.

Hart
begins his broadside on the reliability of the Church’s Tradition (for that is
what it is) with a bit of personal history, including the fact that he suffered
an extended spell of ill health.This,
he said, forced him “to take an even more reflective and deliberate approach to
the task”.It forced him to think more
deeply about the world of the early church, which in turn surprised him by
leaving him with “a deeply melancholy, almost Kierkegaardian sense that most of
us who go by the name of ‘Christian’ ought to give up the pretense of wanting
to be Christian”.By this he meant that if we truly understood
what the New Testament meant by being Christian, we would reject it, for it
would be too radical for us to accept.We would find it, (in his words again) “fairly obnoxious”.We misunderstand the New Testament that
badly, but with the aid of his new New Testament, we can now at last see what
the New Testament really says and what Christianity is really about.

Hart
goes on to share that perhaps his melancholy at this discovery “was deepened by
an accident of timing”—viz. his debate with Samuel Gregg over the intrinsic
evils of capitalism.Hart had denounced
wealth as “an intrinsic evil”, where Gregg argued with him that it was not
wealth itself that the New Testament condemned, but a spiritually unhealthy
preoccupation with it.I am not sure
that the timing was as accidental as all that.I wonder rather if Hart’s diatribe against later Christian culture and
its understanding of the New Testament was not simply a part of his ongoing
personal quarrel with Gregg.Either way
though, Hart’s arguments should be considered on their own merits.

Much of
Hart’s broadside against the Church’s traditional reading of the New Testament
focuses upon the teaching about wealth.And here Hart is not all wrong:there certainly exist happy and complacent capitalists who call
themselves Christians who actually do pay insufficient heed to the New
Testament’s warnings against the danger of wealth.If we have great wealth and are not always at
least a little uneasy about whether or not we are generous enough with it, we are in some danger.But Hart overplays his hand, and in so doing
misreads the New Testament.I suggest
that his view that wealth is intrinsically evil forms the lens through which he
reads the text, resulting in a forced and distorted reading.

It is
true that Christ had some immeasurably hard things to say about the rich and
the dangers of wealth (Luke 6:24-25, 12:33-34, Matthew 6:19-24, 19:16-26).But Hart seems to miss that Christ spoke
similarly hard and radical things in all
His ethical teaching—He warned that hellfire awaited those nurturing rage in
their hearts (Matthew 5:21-22), that one should cut off one’s hand and gouge
out one’s eye if these become occasions of sin, otherwise one would burn in
unquenchable fire (Mark 9:43-48), that faith as small as a mustard seed was
enough to uproot a mountain and hurl it into the sea (Matthew 21:21-22).When one addressed Him flatteringly by
calling Him, “Good Teacher”, He rounded on him and asked him how he could do
that, since no one was good but God alone (Mark 10:17-18). He counseled that if while in the middle of
sacrificing in the Temple one remembered that someone had a grudge against him,
that person should immediately stop what he was doing, leave the sacrificial
animal there with the astonished priest, and run off to make peace. Only then
could he return to finish what he was doing (Matthew 5:23-24).As Chesterton once observed, Christ always
spoke in a kind of divine hyperbole.His
aim thereby was not to instruct so
much as to de-construct—to shake up
His hearers and destroy their complacent presuppositions.We have been put together wrongly and need to
be taken apart so as to be re-assembled properly.Christ’s hyperbolic style as intended to
further this necessary and saving deconstruction and reassembly.We misread Him if we understand Him as
teaching ethics or giving lessons in behavior.His intent was more radical than that.In telling us to gouge out the offending eyeball, for example, He was
targeting not simply a single organ, but an entire vision of life.

But how
to go from this painful deconstruction to actual instruction for living?That is the difference between Christ and His
apostles.He had the sword which struck
down our fatal presuppositions; they had the actual precepts for life.Or in Chesterton’s happy image, the Gospel
was the riddle; the Church was the answer, and that answer may be found in
length in the epistles.And here we must
take issue with Hart’s exegesis. Three examples must suffice.

The
first church in Jerusalem did indeed have all things in common (Acts 2:44-45,
4:32-37).But this paradigm was not
regarded as necessary for all, and was in fact not followed by other
churches.This is no trace of such
“communism” (Hart delights in the word for its shock value) in the other
churches found in Luke’s narrative.And
Paul presupposes that the Christians of Corinth each had their own money, for
he exhorts them to put aside a little of it each Sunday as each may have
prospered during the week (1 Corinthians 16:2).Such instructions would make no sense if all wealth had already been
turned over to a common fund.Luke
offers the Jerusalem experiment in shared wealth as an extraordinary instance
of their mutual love, not as a requirement demanded of all.Christ never commanded such communal
ownership or renunciation of private wealth, with the result that the Church
throughout the Mediterranean in the first century never practiced it.

Hart
also misinterprets James’ denunciation of the rich in James 5:1-6.He dismisses the traditional view that it was
“a dire warning issued only to wealthy persons who have acted unjustly toward
their employees”, and says that this traditional view “inverts the text”, since
James had previously denounced the rich simply because they were rich.Hearkening back to James 1:9-10, Hart says
that the rich “should rejoice in being ‘made low’ or impoverished, as otherwise
he will wither and vanish away like a wildflower scorched by the sun”.In Hart’s reading, unless the rich man gives
away all his wealth, he will be doomed, for he “scarcely merits the name of
‘brother’”.However, this is not what
the text actually says. There is no hint in it that the rich scarcely merits
the name “brother”.The contrast is
between the two types of brothers/ Christians.Both the poor and the rich Christian are told to boast:“Let the lowly brother boast in his
exaltation and the rich in his humiliation”.Vanishing away like a wildflower is not mentioned as a threat which will
overtake the rich if he refuses to give away his wealth, but as the reason for his boasting—he can boast
of his inevitable humiliation and vanishing away because for him also his true
wealth is in the Kingdom.When James considers
the man who says “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and
spend a year there and trade and make a profit” (James 4:13-16), James does not
rebuke his intention to make money, but the boastful arrogance accompanying
it.James does not counsel him to forego
making a profit, but simply to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do
this or that” (v. 15).There is no hint
that the wealth gained in profit was intrinsically evil; only that presuming
one would live to see tomorrow was arrogant folly.Hart simply misunderstands the message of
James.

He
similarly misreads Paul.In Paul’s first
letter to Timothy, Paul accepts that rich men exist among the Christians, and
he does not tell them to give all their money into a communal fund.Rather, he tells them not to be haughty, but
to trust in God rather than in their wealth, to do good, and to be generous and
ready to share (1 Timothy 6:17-19).Hart
translates the word often rendered “ready to share” (Greek koinonikos) and renders it “communalist” (the word “communist”
comes in a footnote), on the slender basis that a koinonikos property is one jointly owned.It is clear from the entire passage that Paul
is urging an attitude, not a change of financial state.If Paul were telling the rich man simply to
dump all his money into the common fund, what then would be the sense of
telling him to “be rich in good works”?For obviously after he had dumped his money he would be incapable of
doing any private works of giving,
since the money and the decisions of how to use it were no longer his.Paul’s advice presupposes the man retains
control of his money.That Paul is
urging personal generosity with private funds is apparent from how everyone
else has translated koinonikos:the King James renders it “ready to
communicate”; the RSV renders it “generous”.The English Standard Version and the New Revised Standard, “ready to
share”; the New King James, “willing to share”; Young’s Literal Translation,
“willing to communicate”; the Complete Jewish Bible, “ready to share”;
Phillips, “to sympathize with those in distress”; the Living Bible, “always
being ready to share with others whatever God has given them”; the New
International Version, “willing to share”; the New English Translation,
“sharing with others”; Douay-Rheims, “to communicate with others”; the Message,
“to be extravagantly generous”. Here it
is Hart contra mundum, and my money
is on the mundum.As another bit of ancient wisdom has it:securus
judicat orbis terrarium—the whole world judges rightly.Again, my money is on the orbis terrarium.

What is
most troubling about Hart’s view of the New Testament is that he asserts that
the Church from the early third century has consistently misread and
misunderstood its own Scriptures (“Clement of Alexandria may have been the
first”), so that the error thus has gone on “throughout Christian history”. No wonder Hart was deeply melancholy. This is
an astonishing charge for an Orthodox to make, and one that effectively sets at
naught the reliability of the exegesis of the Fathers. If Clement and others throughout Christian
history “apply a reassuring gloss to the raw rhetoric of Scripture” so that (for
example) not even Chrysostom’s counsel to his congregation may be received as a
reliable guide, then the Fathers’ guidance about pretty much anything in the
Bible is worthless. If they can miss an
obvious thing like the New Testament’s teaching that wealth is an intrinsic
evil and Christians must therefore be communalists, why trust them about such complex
matters as Christology? Hart says that the
only real Christians were the Desert Fathers, and yet these men never ever said
that Christians living in the world with property were not real
Christians. That charge was left to Hart
to make. Hart therefore stands in a long
line of people telling the Church that its doctrine and practice throughout the
centuries were wrong, and that only now by listening to them could the Church
get it right. In the sixteenth century,
such people were the radical Protestants.
Hart seems to be of one spirit with them.

Fr. Lawrence on Ancient Faith:

BUY the book

Fr. L. at oca.org

Followers

Father Lawrence Farley holds an M.Div.from Wycliffe College, Toronto School of Theology, and also completed a Certificate program at St. Tikhon's Seminary.

Since 1987 he has served as the pastor of St. Herman's Orthodox Church, OCA (Archdiocese of Canada) in Langley BC. Several priests, deacons, and lay members of new missions have emerged from the membership of St. Herman's.